Techniques of notation and behaviour : remarks on elementary forms of organization

The paper accords signification or representation a decisive role in the context of instrumental action. It is argued that the diverse practices subsumed under the notion of organizing are but varied manifestations of the basic operative schema of representation: something for something else. Representation is thereby posited as “consubstantial” with the mundane notion of organization. Both representation and organization imply the institution of diverse systems of notation whose mobile, stable and combinable elements enable the making, and by the same token, also the unmaking and remaking of the world. The vicarious and rehearsable character of the representing elements renders the world manipulable in the sense of imposing on the sheer flow of experience its contrived schemata of temporality and distance and its encoded versions of objects, states and processes. It establishes the proto-conditions of social differentiation, and hierarchy as it appears in its modern version, by creating in a bipolar fashion differences in perspective and knowledge between a centre, i.e. those that encode, accumulate and control combinations of these encoded versions of the world, and a periphery, i.e. local sources of knowledge that are being encoded or controlled. However, these ways of worldmaking obey, at least partly, the logic enfolded in the forms by means of which a representing universe organizes and structures its elements. An attempt is made to reveal this logic by distinguishing different organizing principles falling within the categories of numerical, verbal and pictorial representation, and to connect these principles with the bureaucratic ideal of accountable and calculable behaviour.